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Colin is perplexed by the angry reaction of fans over what they perceive as a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ending. Worse, he says, fans want BioWare to change that ending.

The horror.

A DLC that ‘fixed’ the ending would not be unprecedented. Bethesda did something similar with Fallout 3.

To be fair, I do worry that an alternative-ending-DLC that was not free might be perceived by some as the plan all along – a deliberately unsatisfying (and possibly unreal) ending followed by the “real” ending a few months later for another $10. Maybe not a horrible idea on its face, but with the rest of the tumult and controversy surrounding the game – probably a pretty terrible idea.

But I digress.

Colin also glosses over entirely the fact that players had been led to believe that the choices they made in all three games would affect the outcome of the final chapter. The one resounding complaint over Mass Effect 3 is that gamers feel as though their choices made no difference. That unique Commander Shepard was not so unique after all.

Veering quickly away from Mass Effect altogether, Colin drums up the notion of gamer “entitlement.” Games are cheaper now than ever before, he argues – which, when you adjust for inflation, is pretty much true.

But many gamers would also point out that many titles are shorter.

And why shouldn’t games be cheaper now? Lots of our technology has gotten cheaper as increased competition and efficiency (including outsourcing) has brought costs down. We buy more technology than ever before, including more games.

The video game industry has also grown enormously. Estimates have the game industry passing $70 billion by 2015.

How games are sold has also changed. Now gamers have many different options, including monthly subscriptions and free-to-play games with paid extra content. It’s difficult to gauge the actual cost of games once all the DLC and various subscription costs are taken into account.

But the notion that angry or disappointed fans are displaying a sense of “entitlement” is deeply misguided, and perhaps unique to the gaming industry – a myth perpetuated by the industry and, apparently, by many journalists who cover the industry. Consumers who purchase your goods or services are not acting like they’re “entitled” to something that they have no right to. This implies that they did nothing to deserve their frustration and have no right to complain. It’s a term that in this usage is interchangeable with “spoiled.”

It’s also completely wrong-headed.

Colin says that there’s a “proper” way to complain, but he never really says what that is beyond not buying games or DLC that you don’t like. That’s fine advice, as far as it goes, but I’m not sure why it’s “proper” whereas asking for a new ending is the act of a bunch of selfish children stomping their feet.

What Colin is really saying is that gamers have no investment in the games they play and love (or hate.) It’s the same attitude you hear in politics when someone says “If you don’t love America, why don’t you go somewhere else?”

But gamers really do have investment in their games – often more than in television, a medium where you hear plenty of discontent from fans (yet no television reviewers, to my knowledge, calling the fans “entitled.”) Gamers are often involved in modding games after release, often with the blessing of the developers. New texture packs, characters, or maps are common in games like Skyrim or Valve’s catalogue.

The relationship between gamer and developer, and across the entire community, is a social and participatory relationship. Gamers may not work on the actual development of a title like Mass Effect 3, but they’ve invested their time and money and support into that franchise and there is no one “proper” way to complain about the ending. Nor are angry fans merely “entitled” or “spoiled” simply for angrily voicing their concerns or asking for a new ending.

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I’m glad there is media out there who is getting this story RIGHT. There will always be people who complain just for the sake of complaining, but when this many fans are raising their voices in unison, simply referring to us as “entitled” isn’t even scratching the surface of what is wrong. Thank you for the article.

I think what a lot of people are forgetting is that in a movie or a book you are a passive participate. Games you actively participate in the story. Over three games I put 100′s of hours into the game. I played the games multiple different ways. Mass Effect you are told your choices matter. In the end I get three choices and the only difference is color.

I would also like to add that we protesting and taking donations for Child’s Play. http://retakemasseffect.chipin.com/retake-mass-effect-childs-play

There is a sense of mass hysteria amongst the gaming community here, and the level of hyperbole reached is worrisome, however.

Labeling every dissenter as “entitled” is wrong-headed, but there is also a sentiment that only the specific ending a player has in his or her head is not only correct, but must be brought to life. Personal betrayal arguments and self-righteous anger taint discourse, in my opinion.

It’s maddening to see legitimate grievances about the game drowned out by inane and vitriolic comments. Perhaps a better label for the distasteful elements of a (right and reasonable) concerned population would be “hysteric”?

This doesn’t actually make a whit of difference. Just because the game itself provides you with choices inside the narrative doesn’t mean you have any power over it outside the bounds of the game. Your choices inside the narrative pervade through the entire game. The results are in the game everywhere, just not in the last 10 minutes (in fact, many of those results *are* reflected in the assault on earth itself).

The problem with the ‘bad restaurant’ metaphor is that in that case you have a qualitatively bad experience through a lack of effort from the restaurant.

That’s not the case here. BioWare made a creative choice for the ending. If you want to feel ‘entitled’ to a different ending you’ll have to prove that this ending is the result of negligence, lazyness or otherwise which impacted the actual quality of your experience negatively. If they’d done the last 10 minutes with a few badly drawn cartoons and a splash screen that said ‘TEH IND!!’, THEN you’d be right in saying you are entitled to something better for the money you paid.

Now however, we have a creative choice which the developers took very deliberately. This is also documented in the Final Hours ebook.

So, yes, you are allowed to negatively review Mass Effect 3 because you didn’t like the ending! Of course you are! However, it is silly to DEMAND A NEW ENDING!!! because you don’t agree with a creative choice. That’s the author’s prerogative.

Thank goodness for the sound of reason. Frankly, I hope Bioware retains some creative/authorial integrity and does not “fix” the ending.

The invisible attitude of entitlement (because “money equals right” or “lots of people agree with me so I’m right”) lodged in most of these comments scares me. With regard to creative works, your willingness to buy something does not entitle you to have it. Merely, because a lot of people hold a certain opinion doesn’t make that opinion valid.

You didn’t like the ending. That’s cool. You’re free to dislike the creative choices made by Bioware. You’re free to be as vocal about that dislike as you choose. You’re free to not buy their next game. You’re free to petition them to change the ending. You are not free to DEMAND they give authorial control of their work to you…and your willingness to pay for it doesn’t somehow change that.

While I think there is art in video games, they are a product first, at least once they get on the level of Mass Effect. That’s very easy to prove by simply asking whether you think there would be a Mass Effect 2 and 3 if the first had bombed in sales? Yeah probably not. Customers do indeed have entitlements because without customers (or the perception that there will be customers for the product), NONE of these big budget games would get made. Bioware literally NEEDS customers, just like any other company. That’s called capitalism. Ultimately they so have the rights to their products. Nobody is arguing that we legally demand anything. Demands are just forceful feedback and customers giving a company a chance to either “make it right” or lose their customers.in the end Bioware has the final say but fans have just as much right to demand ending tweaks as you have to demand they keep the endings as is for their “creative integrity.”

I would agree with you if you were right. But you’re not. If you were paying anything more than cursory attention, you’d discover that fans are upset first and foremost by the poor delivery of the content, even more than the content itself.

“If you want to feel ‘entitled’ to a different ending you’ll have to prove that this ending is the result of negligence, lazyness or otherwise which impacted the actual quality of your experience negatively.” <— that's not at all difficult to do, and is in fact why there are now almost 40,000 likes on the "Take Back Mass Effect 3" Facebook page demanding fixes to the ending. The ending was disjointed, abbreviated and without any of the emotional impact or narrative storytelling what had been a part of the mass effect 3 game all the way up until the last 5 minutes. Fragmented cutscenes had no relationship to the story has it had been told up to the last five minutes, were not explained in anyway. No emotion. No closure. And an ending that makes no sense (Joke just decided to go on a beer run with the Normany and random (but not all) members of the crew, then just so happen to crash on some planet, we have no idea what/where, and get out smiling – the end? Really?

I have no argument with the story boarding for this story. If bioware wants to tell the story in a way where, at the end of the journey, sheperd really has very little choice in the final outcome – then we can talk about the themes of fate and destiny and that's fine. It was the fact that the last 5 minutes of what has been a five year investment on most of our parts (ME 1, 2 and 3) was so POORLY TOLD that it was utterly inexcusable.

It was as though Bioware farmed out the ending to some other company… We deserve better. We deserve the quality we have come to expect from the series. Again, I'm not arguing about the storyline. If they want us to have three choices, all of them harsh, that's great – but then TELL THAT STORY WITH DEPTH AND FEELING FOR GODS SAKE.

It’s not silly for people to demand a new ending. Rather, it’s silly for people to act like this game was some work of literature on par with a fine novel or artistic cinema, like it has artistic integrity and we should respect the artiste. No, this game is a piece of crap, with a terrible plot full of inconsistencies; flat, dry characters; and just plain bad game-design decisions (inability to import your previous character being the first in a long list of things that gamers should DEMAND redress for). Prime characters from 1 and 2 were given bit parts in 3; there was launch-day DLC that cost extra (but was “free” with the collector’s edition, although once installed on one console, it could not be moved to another!); and then there’s the terrible ending that is inexcusably bad. No matter what crack-smoking idiot came up with this shoddy, ramshackle crap, it’s still shoddy and ramshackle, and they’re still a crack smoker. I am guessing they went out to Sixth Street and partied early to celebrate completing the game, then hasitly rushed through finishing the ending. Anyone remember the ending to Neon Genesis Evangelion? Yeah, at least that was artistic. And they still remade it, because it was so terrible. If I had paid $60 for this game, and they didn’t fix it, then I’d have a brick for Bioware’s window.

Taganov: they lost all integrity when they promised a flexible-outcome game, then did not deliver one. Their software is supposed to be a role-playing game, which necessarily entails the player being the author of the story to a great extent (that is the WHOLE POINT of RPGs).

Can you imagine a 5-year tabletop D&D campaign ending with the GM saying, “and then God comes down and kills you all. Cya.”

I mean, that’s not integrity, that’s laziness no matter how you cut it. Just because it is deliberate does not make it somehow not laziness.

Okay, you are a child Jon Gilbert. Just because you thought the ending was bad makes the entire trilogy bad? Have you ever had a creative job. These people put 8 years into the trilogy. Even when a game reviews badly, the reviewers don’t go after the developer personally like you and the other children. And a game, like most things, is an artistic platform. See ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, etc. All games have stories that make allusions and are metaphors. These are literary devices. Just because its interactive doesn’t mean anything. EVERY PERMUTATION WAS WRITTEN by a writer.

you aren’t acknowledging that a large portion of the game did, in fact, allow extensive control, much like fans expected. True, the ending was funneled. But don’t let that make you forget about what came before it. Maybe the designers intended you to feel trapped, strange as it may seem? You may not agree with their decision, and you have every right to complain about it – but feeling you have the right to demand they change it is a step closer to arrogance

so using your logic, if a piece of entertainment is able to empower the user to want to make their own choices in principle… then that user is entitled to demand change from the author such that their own preferences are personally catered to?

When you’re enjoying a ham sandwich and discover *half* a cockroach in the last bite, would you expect the Manager to go on and on about how well his chef made the sandwich, how well it was presented, what lovely decor his restuarant has, and how you should feel privileged to eat here in the first place?

No, he’d be embarrassed. Refund you the meal and give you a free ticket to the next one.

Bart: What they did with this ending was just a step up from badly drawn cartoons and a splash screen. Most of the rage comes precisely because the ending has all the signs of a rushed product. It doesn’t make sense from a story point of view, it reuses all the assets so essentially its the same ending no matter what. There are plenty of places where you can see detailed analysis of why this ending is the result of negligence, lazyness and impacted our experience, experience of hours through 3 games negatively.